Epistemological decentring: At the root of a contemporary and situational anthropology

Abstract

To what extent can anthropology still help us to understand the world around us at a time when this world is characterized by processes of political and economic multipolarity, and the decolonization of knowledge? The political questioning of cultural decentring is an opportunity for anthropology to build a new epistemological conception of decentring. Against and beyond cultural relativism, ethnicism or ontological perspectivism, the issue is knowing how to decentre in any situation, ‘here and now’, from oneself as much as from each ‘we’, searching for tangible and intangible limits, and making those borders places of observation and understanding of increasingly more cosmopolitan social and cultural lives. I develop and propose this new conception in three stages. The first contextual stage highlights the importance of border situations and the necessity to account for them in order to tackle globalization as an observable social fact, beyond and against frozen representations of Others’ cultures and identities. The second stage explores the possibility of a post-culturalist decentring. In this reflection I turn to philosophy, from Rousseau to Foucault and Agamben, to find cues for an epistemological conception of decentring. In the last part I emphasize the understanding of situations, and rehabilitate reflexive ethnography and the situational inductive approach as the foundations of contemporary anthropology.